The Impossible Thingby John McGroarty

Genre:DramaSwearwords: None.Description:PART THREE: ​After a week spent in his Pyrenean mountain retreat, a Spanish journalist returns reinvigorated to Barcelona and begins to make a real difference to the lives of others.

​​I started back to work in September. It was noticeable, the change in me. Colleagues made jokes about it. Ribbed me and prodded jibes my way. Asked me if I had discovered Jesus or was on Prozac. Dani insisted I tell him as he had read cases of people going crazy and killing everyone in the office on anti-depressants. Everybody laughed. Except Magdalena, who is even more neurotic than me and was genuinely worried for a few weeks until something else took over her fraught imagination and she forgot about me. I went about my work with a great passion which spilled over into my journalistic prose. I raised the level of banal gossip pieces and descriptions of fancy posh houses to high literature. My boss had to tell me to tone it down. One scion of the fascist aristocracy had written him to ask if I had been really making fun of him the whole time. Hey, Truman Capote, if you want to write literature, he told me, write a novel; I want straight uncomplicated prose with no frills except for sucking subservience and wide-eyed breathless admiration when called for. I took his advice and stuck to the rules and started a book in my spare time. It was to be a positive story. There were so many books that had been written to show how bad and evil we all are and how everything is fated to end badly and so I decided to write a book contracorriente in which everyone acts unselfishly and everything comes out well and the world becomes a better place and there is an unironic happy ending. I called it The Cosmological Happiness Machine. It was about a guy who invents a machine into which people can put all of their angst and fear and hatreds and negativity and receive in exchange a series of actions to help three people in their area and those three help another three branching out exponentially. The whole time I was consciously keeping my spirits high and my eyes peeled for the chance to do the good act in real life. To make the fantasy real. I worked out a sort of philosophy of good actions in my head. It was the opposite of the old saying about murder: that once you had killed one person it was easier to kill the next. My plan was that once you had carried out a good selfless act the next one was easier and the following easier still until it became a way of life and, just like in my book, it would have a ripple effect in society as the recipients would then do their own good acts and the recipients of the recipients till all of society had been completely transformed and altruism had replaced selfishness as the law of life. The economy would be changed as we all came to realise that all our existence till then had been a zero sum game and that we would start to calculate differently. That the negation of the other would be banished and only the positive sum game for all would be left. We would give new values to things. True happiness would be the consideration of all. We would value the trees and the animals and the rivers and their conservation and the future of our children and their children and all would have something in common again. Become natural beings again. We would find what had been lost and broken when Watt had first adapted the engine of the world and all economic values would flow through technology to the once promised land and the impossible thing would become possible and extant in all our lives. I tried to explain it all to Cristina but she just laughed and shook her head. It’s called Karma, Jake, she said, or Christianity, it doesn’t work unless everyone does it. You’re just opening yourself up to disappointment. It was good advice but I was so wrapped up in the need for it all to be true that I couldn’t listen. I was enraptured, hyper, fully engaged, brimming over and bursting with life. I couldn’t get enough of the stuff. Life, life, life, I cried, and swept ever onwards. Yet I still had not found the chance I had been searching for. To make a real difference to the life of someone. Something tangible and memorable in the goodness stakes. Something for which I would be remembered. Something that would be a real blow to the egotism and shallowness of modern life. Then one day I was having lunch with some of the people from the office and one of the girls was killing time before going back and started scrolling through her Facebook page. Poor thing, she said, and showed us a photo of a child of eight or nine years on the screen. This was the first time that I saw him. Little Victor. It was an appeal to raise money for the boy. He was suffering from a rare degenerative genetic disease which could only be treated in a clinic in Los Angeles. It was his one and only chance, the post said. I pounced on it like a benign big cat. This was it. I just knew. When I got back to the office I started to investigate. I quickly discovered that the boy’s parents had a webpage. It wasn’t a very professional job and I thought that it would never attract any interest. They needed to raise a hundred thousand Euros to cover the costs of the operation and their stay in the States. There was a contact address for the boy’s father and I sent him off an email offering my help. This was my chance. Altruism was pumping through my veins. It was a few days before I received a reply. It was from the father. Alberto, he identified himself as. The first few paragraphs were tentative but then he launched himself into an incoherent flow-of-consciousness description of his son’s illness and all he and his wife had been doing over the last few years to try to raise some money. With little success. And time was running out, he added. My analytical journalist’s eye saw immediately how badly everything was explained and that the grammar and spelling seriously needed correcting. There were no accents and missing “h’s” and “b’s” for “v’s” and sometimes the wrong verb tense and long commaless sentences making the whole message difficult to understand. I did a little research on the Internet about the disease and then rewrote everything in short clear sentences, making all the necessary grammatical changes. I then sent it back to him and offered to help further. I was thinking that I could write a piece for the magazine. There was a good causes section. I had always regarded it as mawkish and had never paid any real attention. It was full of photos of millionaire footballers and populist celebs visiting children in hospitals or launching tax-break foundations. I was sure that I could get little Victor’s story in but first we would have to change the webpage and set up a better, more secure, way for people to make a donation. Alberto and I exchanged a couple of emails and arranged to meet that weekend. I was euphoric and felt that finally I was living a truly authentic life. I counted off the days till the following Saturday.

We met in a small bar on Guipúzcoa. My first thoughts were that he was a little old to be the father of an eight-year-old. He was in his fifties and his face was weather beaten and his eyes blood cracked and his breath stank. We shook hands, ordered coffee, and took a table close to the door. Like in his email he was quiet at first and then opened up completely and unreservedly. As if we had been buddies for a thousand years. He gave the impression of being a simple person. Humble and uneducated but genuine. Salt of the earth. There was a certain underlying charisma to his voice and his body language and he seemed to be self-assured. After twenty minutes his wife arrived. She introduced herself as Mónica. She was at least ten years younger than him and stick thin with blonde hair and blue eyes and had a hard chiselled face. One of the Visigoths. You couldn’t say they made a nice couple. I was there to help and my hard-boiled journalist’s eye was part of the old me so I switched it off. Alberto told me about their life. I just let him speak. It’s always the best way. I would prettify it and write it all up later. They weren’t Catalans and had come to the city from the capital in search of work. They had lived all over Spain, moving around when the need moved them. They had lived for many years in Madrid and Alberto had worked in construction in the good times before the crack of zero eight. That was when they had come to Barcelona. Mónica wanted to live near the sea and there were more jobs in the tourist trade. She had got a job in the kitchens of a big hotel in the centre and Alberto had had various posts as barman. Then she got pregnant and they wanted to settle down permanently here to give stability to the boy. It was now half past one and we ordered lunch and talked on till almost five o’clock. I spoke a little about myself and about how I felt I could help them publicise their son’s case and raise the money. I told them honestly that they needed to explain things better and be more professional or they would get nowhere. I told them about PayPal and recommended that they open an account and link it to a bank account. That I would rewrite the webpage in an appropriate style and open a Twitter account. That when we had that done I could write a piece for our magazine and really get the ball rolling. Mónica was ecstatic and there were tears in her eyes but Alberto was quiet again. He looked at me with suspicion in his eyes. He wanted to know what was in it for me. I sighed internally and told him a lie. That I was looking for a case to get nationwide attention and further my career. This seemed to satisfy him. That was when it struck me. The madness of the whole affair. How could they understand my need? How could I tell them about the impossible thing? About the cosmological happiness machine? We met a few times over the coming weeks and I worked away at the article for the magazine. I went to their small flat in Sant Martí and we configured everything on their computer. Opened the payment channel and linked it to an account. I met Victor and we played PlayStation soccer. He seemed an otherwise happy kid. He giggled as children do and enjoyed the attention. After a few more days everything was ready and I asked to speak to my editor and showed him the article and explained. He seemed pleased and it was published the following week. He used to claim all choked up that it was the good causes we supported that kept him going. The article was a great success. Far better than we could have hoped for. There were over a thousand comments on the online edition and it was shared fifty times on Facebook. We received countless calls asking how to make a donation. Alberto phoned me three days later in an excited voice. They had received almost fifty thousand Euros. It’s all, he gushed, thanks to you. I felt a profound feeling of satisfaction and peace the like of which I had never known before. The money kept rolling in over the next week but then stopped as the popular mind turned its attention elsewhere. We were still forty thousand short. I racked my brains and finally came up with the idea of a special online appeal day on social media. I knew a few celebrities who owed me a favour and contacted them and they promised their support and some their active help. That was when the TV presenter Eduard Vidal and a couple of Socialist MPs got involved and the whole campaign went national and made it onto the news on Antena 3 and Telecinco as well as the Catalan TV channels. I was even interviewed for the Telecinco piece and got to put over some of my ideas. Alberto and Mónica were featured in a five minute slot on Catalonia’s TV3 and a documentary was produced about rare genetic disorders and a public debate was opened about those left behind by the system. The target was quickly reached and surpassed and Alberto stated that he wanted to open a charitable foundation with the extra money to help other parents in a similar position. My theories had found actuality in Alberto. The goodness I had done had set up a chain of mutual help and support. I had never felt happier in my life. Finally my skills as a journalist had served some useful purpose! I wrote feverishly at night to pour all of this positivity into my book. To ride this great wave of wholeness and joy and produce my own testament to it all. I had delusions of goodness grandeur. Only good is great I thought to myself as I pounded away on the keyboard. It was in this condition of ecstatic hope and satisfaction that Cristina and I went off to Valencia for the November weekend. The cosmological happiness machine was puffing at full steam in my brain and the impossible thing was starting to look possible. I even truly believed that it was the end of my manic depressions. That I had stabilized the economy of my mental boom and bust. That I had found the fabled steady happy state. The goal of all reformers and idealists since Bentham. The realization of the desire for happiness in the world. A full natural being at last.

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About the Author

​John McGroarty was born in Glasgow and now lives in Barcelona, where he works as an English teacher. He has been writing short stories for many years. His long short story, Rainbow, his novel, The Tower, and his two short fiction collections, Everywhere and Homo Sacer, are all McStorytellers publications.